Skepticism

EVENTS

Nitpicky terminology distinction

Minor point that I wanted to clarify for the benefit of all, since a student just brought it up to me.

When we take pictures of stuff we see on the microscope, it’s called photomicrography. We are taking photomicrographs, or photographs of microscopic object.

It is not microphotography. A microphotograph is a teeny-tiny little picture, a small picture of a larger object. You’d need a hand lens to see a microphotograph.

OK? Just a little peeve. You’ll sometimes see people using the two terms interchangeably. They are bad people who must be crushed immediately, their remains scuffed into the dust, and their names obliterated from all stelae and funerary urns.

I do photomicrography, and have never ever done microphotography (which is a real thing, it’s just not what microscopists do.) If you need help remembering the distinction, just remember my initials are PM, and I do PhotoMicrography. So you don’t get pissmisticated when you make a horrible gaffe in front of me.

(The student got it right, by the way, and so I allowed them to live.)

(The student got it right, by the way, and so I allowed them to live.)

Warning! Now that you have opened the black pit of controversy that is the Oxford Comma debate, it’s open season on picky grammar points!

In general, I am one of those who believe that “they” will eventually come to mean “a person or persons of undetermined gender” just as “he” had that definition in unenlightened times. All of the other alternatives (hir and xe, s/he, he or she) just seem too clunky to me.

In the sentence above, though, presumably the student had a gender, so why not use it?

Our 1st year physics lab tech would become furious if you couldn’t properly identify graph paper (which apparently, has a specific definition). It was sometimes used against him; students would loudly misidentify the paper type.

Despite all his passion for the subject, I still don’t know the difference (or what the other type of paper was even called).

@7 I work in a Pathology Lab and every year we have word search and fill in the blank games for Lab Week. I am always impressed if I get Dermatopathologist correct (I m an IT nerd I learned the lab speak in self defense. And funny you should mention it but our pathologists use Pixelink cameras on their scopes….

Possibly because the student’s gender is no one’s concern. I do the same when I don’t want to reduce anonymity.
“They” (singular) does have that meaning, and has for hundreds of years. Probably since we lost separate gender plurals. (where the mixed-gender plural may have defaulted to the masc., but I dunno).

Of course the ‘original’ root word was masculine, so maybe people can find an offense in that too. It seems that any usage or root of a word, if it was used as a masc. word at some point, is poisoned forever regardless as to its history of being neutral or inclusive as well. OTOH, it makes sense to me to find a different word, perhaps, when the current usage is mostly gendered and falling back to a non-gendered definition or re-defining it to be non-gendered is unlikely.

So here’s the neat thing everyone should realize: You can get a damned good photo by holding a mediocre digital camera or cellphone up to the ordinary objective lens of a microscope, spotting scope, or telescope. If you have something you want to capture, and especially if it is fleeting, don’t wait on the “right” set-up. Pull out your cellphone, put it up to the objective, and shoot away.

Since we are nitpicking, then pronunciation is within the bounds of this topic.

Do you pronounce it as “MY-CROG-raphy” or “MY-cro-GRAPHY” or “mick-ROG-raphy”, or some other long-short combination of syllables?

Our American cousins (there are other parts of the world where the English language is usefully employed as a medium of communication) have an attachment to elongating vowels (“semi” pronounced as “semeye”, for example). Such a waste of time, but whatever butters your toast.

I am sure that other civilisations will wait until you finally, eventually, agonisingly finish a sentence (and will forgive your rebarbative neologisms). Where you elongate vowels, we elongate sentences.

Because I do a lot of close-up photography, I have a similar peeve with the term ‘macro photography’ which is supposed to designate the magnification range between photomicrography and normal photography, roughly from 0.1X to about 10X; i.e, images larger than the real-life size of the subject, but not requiring a microscope. ‘Macro photography’ would mean the taking of very large images, presumably with an 8X10 view camera, or some such. The proper term for images in this middling magnification range is ‘photomacrography.’

Sorry, voting for microphotography just because it’s easier for me to say. And, everyone understands what you mean – photographs taken through a microscope. Nobody imagines teeny itsy bitsy little photos. We have microfilm for that.

If you go back far enough, surprises come in… Proto-Indo-European, for the broad sense of Indo-European, didn’t have masculine and feminine genders. It had an animate and an inanimate gender, like… Cree for instance.